Deep Lab

Deep Lab

“There is something about the internet that isn’t working anymore”: a group of women hackers, artists, and theorists gathered at Carnegie Mellon University in December 2014 to answer the question of what, exactly, that disquieting “something” is.

Internet Archive

Internet Archive

Brewster Kahle is on a mission to save the World Wide Web, and build Universal Access to All Knowledge. Since founding the Internet Archive in 1996, the collection has grown into the world's largest online library, offering 10 petabytes of archived websites, books, movies, music, and television broadcasts.

CLOUDS

An interactive documentary co-directed with James George

CLOUDS is an interactive documentary (co-directed with James George) that presents a conversation among fifty artists, designers, and hackers who use code, and collaborate on open source tool kits. It explores themes of creativity and invention, interactive art, simulation, computational design, data visualization, and the future of storytelling.

Filmed using a new 3D cinema format called RGBD and created entirely with open-source software, CLOUDS uses a data-driven Story Engine to present an endless, ever-changing conversation. The system allows viewers to navigate a web of ideas and engage with immersive visualizations.

CLOUDS is not a linear film, but a real-time executable which generates sequences of dialogue based on interactive input. Each of the interviews has been edited into individual fragments, and richly tagged. An algorithm then leaps from clip to clip, creating new conversations on the fly, while preserving continuity of ideas and themes. Viewers use gesture and spatial interaction metaphors to chart a course through the rhizomatic content space.

The interview subjects in CLOUDS are an intergenerational community of more than 40 artists, designers, hackers and thinkers. They discuss the challenges of developing new forms of expression that resonate at a deeper human level. The documentary captures the story of collaboratively inventing open-source tools that form the foundation of a global creative culture. Interview subjects include founders of free creative coding platforms, such as Casey Reas and Zach Lieberman, as well as critical perspectives from thinkers like Bruce Sterling and Regine Debatty.

Someday Somewhere Beyond

Someday Somewhere Beyond

Imagine a city in space -- a round structure miles across that millions would call home. Engineers working at NASA in the 1970s developed colorful proposals for permanent settlements in space, but their plans were shelved and forgotten. Decades later, a new generation of dreamers from high schools around the world aspire to mine asteroids, terraform other planets, and venture to the stars. The students have come together for a contest at NASA, and have big plans for the next millennium.

The Moon and Beyond

Astrobotic: The Moon and Beyond

Space Artist

Space Artist

Lowry Burgess, a pioneer space artist, has over 30 years of experience collaborating with NASA and creating visionary artworks in a cosmic context. In 2013, a robotic mission from Carnegie Mellon (the first commercially funded lunar expedition) will send his art to the Moon.

The Moon Arts Group envisions creative ways of establishing a link between the Earth and Moon, advances the presence of human culture in space, and facilitates never before realized opportunities for art and exploration.

Happy Tree

Happy Tree

A scientist studying the roots of consciousness finds her feelings reciprocated by a plant.

Winner of the 2014 Imagine Science Film Festival 48 Film Competition

Written and Directed by Jonathan Minard and Scott Rashap

Cinematography by Sam Heesen

Featuring Mari Meyer and Theodore Bouloukos.

Oldest Living Things

Oldest Living Things In the World

Since 2004 artist Rachel Sussman has been researching, working with biologists, and traveling the world to photograph continuously living organisms 2000 years old and older. She approaches her subjects as individuals, taking their portraits in order to relate to deep time from a human perspective.

Biosphere2

Biosphere 2

In 1991, a crew of eight astronauts embarked on a two year mission to live inside of an artificial habitat in the Arizona desert. The Biosphere 2 experiment was designed to test the viability of a fully enclosed ecosystem, simulating a space colony on the Moon or Mars. Beset by technical challenges, a depletion of oxygen in the atmosphere and insufficient crop yield to feed the crew, the mission was aborted and deemed a catastrophic failure. For more on space habitats, see Someday Somewhere Beyond.

PostNatural History

Center for PostNatural History: GloFish

PostNatural History: Fruit Flies

PostNatural History: Transgenic American Chestnut

PostNatural History: Mosquitoes

PostNatural History: BioSteel Goats

DIY Embryology

DIY Embryology

Adam Zaretsky demonstrates DIY genomics on live pheasant embryos.

Popcorn Project

Popcorn Project

A search for two identical pieces of popcorn leads art student, Jesha Chen, to the center of a quantum paradox.

Does God play dice?

Past Perfect

Margaret

Past Perfect: Backing up life, one day at a time.

Past Perfect is a service offering individuals an opportunity to upload their most treasured memories to the cloud.

The creation of this speculative business consisted of promotional videos, and sample backups of actual people's memories. We solicited prospective customers on Craigslist who volunteered the memory of one day in their lives which we produced into short films.

In collaboration with Scott Rashap and Lauren McCarthy, the project was realized through the TriBeCa film Institute's Story hackathon, in May 2013.